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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard
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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Sea
Ocean
Quite
Cannot
Something
Pronounces
Make
Hoarse
Whisper
Beach
More quotes by Annie Dillard
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Annie Dillard
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
Annie Dillard
Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
Annie Dillard
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
Annie Dillard
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
Annie Dillard
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
Annie Dillard
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
Annie Dillard
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
Annie Dillard
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
Annie Dillard
Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
Annie Dillard
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
Annie Dillard
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
Annie Dillard
I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
Annie Dillard
I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
